Caged Condor

By R. Z. Sheppard

CONVERSATION IN THE CATHEDRAL by MARIO VARGAS LLOSA Translated by GREGORY RABASSA 601 pages. Harper & Row. $12.50.

While the American novel is still growing warts worrying about which direction to take, The Other American Novel confidently barrels on oblivious to paper shortages and critical advisories that less is more. Throughout Central and South America, writers still seem willing to tackle the long, complex novel of politics, society and class. Open to most literary influences and rarely shy about blending them, Latin American authors frequently give the impression that they are catering a novel rather than composing one. There are exceptions. Argentina's Jorges Luis Borges, for example, builds exquisite doll houses from bits of literary history, fantasy and skeptical philosophy. He has become, not surprisingly, one of the major influences on contemporary U.S. fiction. But the Latin appetite for the big bite has in recent years produced one unquestionable masterpiece: in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez completely and gloriously occupied his mythical territory of Macondo, a tropical Yoknapatawpha.

Brutal Naturalism. If Garcia Marquez is Latin America's Faulkner, Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa is aesthetically, if not stylistically, its Dreiser. His first novel, The City of the Dogs, was a brutal slab of naturalism about life and violent death at a Peruvian military school for problem youth--a place not unlike the institution Vargas Llosa attended in the early 1950s. Officials at the school ensured the author a wide readership and international attention by publicly burning 1,000 copies of his book.

Vargas Llosa's second novel, The Green House, was respectfully roasted by some critics for its chaotic form, thematic dead ends and lock-step fatalism. There remained, however, the author's undeniable ability to generate powerful atmospheres within his remorseless, self-imposed boundaries.

The same judgments apply to Conversation in the Cathedral, a long, layered tale about indolence, greed, violence, corruption, sexual perversion and general animal cunning in modern Peru. The novel is a vortex of determinism driven by one central question: "At what precise moment,"asks the leading character, "had Peru--itself up?"

The answer is not forthcoming, but the question pervades everything and everyone as surely as Lima's chilly mists.

The book is a chronicle of botched hopes and personal failures. The government sinks in corruption and ineptitude. Idealistic university students stumble over their ignorance and lack of discipline. A servant girl's brief moment of romance leads to jungle rot and death in childbirth. Cynical political hacks are failed Communists and newspapermen are often failed poets who have difficulty with the fundamentals of news writing. "You have to start with the dead people, young man," advises one helpful editor. The novel's title does not refer to the church, which the author oddly does not deal with, but to a Lima bar and brothel called the Cathedral.

Vargas Llosa, who now lives in Spain, has two principal responses to this mess. There is the bitter disillusionment of his leading character, Santiago Zavala, a rich politician's son who rejects the easy life to take a grubby, low-paying job on a Lima newspaper. Secondly, there is the mindless acceptance of a dog-eat-dog world as characterized by Ambrosio, a knockabout torpedo who had been the elder Zavala's chauffeur, bodyguard and occasional bit of rough trade.

This bleak, narrow vision becomes a strain in a book whose epigraph is Balzac's expansive statement that "the novel is the private history of nations.'' It also keeps Vargas Llosa's obviously large, fierce talent caged like the condors at the Lima zoo.

R.Z. Sheppard

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.